PBS - The Address Ken Burns (2014)
At the tiny Greenwood School in the small New England town of Putney, Vermont, its roughly 50 students, boys from the ages of 11 to 17, are asked each year to memorize the Gettysburg Address. This would be a daunting assignment for any student, but the boys at Greenwood all suffer from learning differences that have made their personal, academic and social progress extremely challenging.
Embedding camera crews at the school for three months to chronicle the boys' struggle to learn Abraham Lincoln's immortal words and deliver them in a final public recitation, acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns has created a fascinating and inspiring documentary that shows them heroically confronting past failures and humiliations, ultimately opening the door to what Lincoln himself called “a new birth of freedom.”
Interweaving the history of this most famous of American speeches with the contemporary journey of the boys at Greenwood, The Address reveals the timeless resonance of Lincoln's words, while culminating in the triumph of the human spirit.
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